This is very much my own view too. I've often used the idea that philosophy leads us to a door we have to open by other means. My only concern is that, in this particular thread, we've gotten ourselves round to thinking that the claim of philosophy to be "highest" (sorry for the scare quotes!) must be opposed to other forms of knowledge. I tried to guard against this when I wrote, in the OP:

First, a clarification: The idea I’m referring to doesn’t denigrate poetry, or fiction, or prayer, or paying compliments, or any other non-discursive uses of language. Whether such uses represent anything “higher” than philosophical discourse is a separate question, though of course a related one, and interesting in its own right. Here I’m sticking to the discourses of rational inquiry. — J

I can weigh in, briefly, on that separate question: I think the languages of art and of faith (and the experiences which those languages attempt to capture) are, for me, higher in the sense that they take me closer to understanding who I am, and what is the source of my being. But there . . . such talk is no longer philosophical discourse, in my understanding, so I'll stop.

And from the Sufi tradition, the Master's Prayer:

O Parvardigar, the Preserver and Protector of All,
You are without Beginning and without End,
Non-dual, beyond comparison, and none can measure You.
You are without colour, without expression, without form and without attributes.
You are unlimited and unfathomable, beyond imagination and conception, eternal and imperishable.

Nagel's ironic response to absurdity, — Count Timothy von Icarus

I reread the Nagel piece. I can't help thinking that "irony" was the wrong word for what he was trying to say. He writes that, after we've questioned how seriously we ought to take our lives, and human life in general, "We then return to our lives, as we must, but our seriousness is laced with irony." Doesn't he mean something more like "detachment" or "bemusement"? Irony generally refers to a quality of appearing to be one thing when actually being, or meaning, another, and I don't see that here. Unless he means that we can't take our seriousness seriously?

The final sentence of the essay is, "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair." This makes it sound like a Camusian creed, but it's in the context of his final point, which is that absurdity is only a problem if we make it so, by insisting that our concern about not mattering has to matter a great deal.

In any case, I'm curious why you think the piece deserves to be called "an example of all that is wrong with modern philosophy." It seems a rather innocuous early piece to me, not as good as Nagel usually is but hardly all that misguided.

"the view from nowhere" is a more modern term, I think, though maybe I'm wrong there. — Moliere

Yes, it is, and not everyone uses it the same way. I use it to refer to an ideal objective viewpoint, the convergence point for rational inquiry, from which we can see what is actually the case, as opposed to whatever various beliefs and opinions may present themselves to us in the "heteronomous" world (Kant). Obviously there are grave doubts among many philosophers about whether such a viewpoint even makes sense.

But see how the analogy has a place, rather than being a "view from nowhere"? — Moliere

In the sense that it's a visual analogy, sure. But when, as the Wiki has it, Plato tells us through Socrates that "the object was essentially or 'really' the Form and that the phenomena were mere shadows mimicking the Form," this is meant to be what I'm calling a view from nowhere. That is, we aren't supposed to think, "Well, that's how Plato sees it" or "That's a possible view" or even, "Humans have to see it that way" but rather "This is what is really the case, regardless of what you or I or Socrates believes." A God's-eye view, if you will. Again, these worries about idealized objectivity are modern, but I'm pretty sure Plato thought that what dianoia and noesis reveals is viewpoint-independent.

Another point is how radically different Socratic philosophy is from "the view from nowhere". — Fooloso4

In general I agree with your emphasis on the dialogical aspect of Platonic thought, but let's not get carried away. When Socrates asks for a definition of a term that he and all the interlocutors believe is important but disagree about, he is surely trying to find the view from nowhere, the place where we transcend doxa and perhaps, eventually, dianoia as well, and can see the Good itself. Now the ability to do this may indeed depend upon personal/subjective virtues, as opposed to simply being good at argumentation, but that's not the same thing as saying that Plato didn't think rationality was objective in a sense that strongly resembles our own.

There needs to be something about the sequence of questions that renders each of them somehow relevant to what they're asked, and the answer to be informative to what it's asked of. That is, the question has to be a "good" question in a nebulous sense and the answer has to be a "good" answer in a nebulous sense. — fdrake

What if we loosen Q ( X ) a little, so that it doesn't have to be, literally, "What is your justification for X?" each time. Thus, the response here:

If you asked "What is your justification for "I speak English?"?, one could very well answer "I speak English" as a demonstration — fdrake

could change to, "Could you explain how 'I speak English' provides a reasonable answer to my question?" This is still asking for a justification, but from a different angle or level. Which leads to this:

One way of fleshing that out [a guarantee that one would always end up in philosophy when asking justificatory questions] would mean at some point questions about justification always become philosophical. About the meaning of justification. — fdrake

It's an "up-a-level" question because it asks the interlocutor to justify why they believe that "I speak English" is a justification.

I think this gets closer to giving an account of how a call for justification is what the Q recursion is, but the more plausible our account gets, the less it seems to be formalizable. Or maybe the problem is with the "nebulous" terms like "good" (and perhaps "relevant") and not the form itself. And are we any closer to demonstrating that this characterizes what phil. is, or must be? Probably not, since so many divergent accounts of phil. are possible. But if phil. is understood as "rational discourse in a context of communicative action," then perhaps we've made an advance.

I'll say that a question is good when it reveals something about how what it is asked of is known or supplementary information about what it is asked of. And perhaps we should assume that the answerer plays nicely and just answers truthfully, directly and sincerely every time. No frame shifting on their part. — fdrake

I like this, though if the answerer tries any deception or frame-shifting, that doesn't really have any bearing on whether the question is a good one, does it? Nor does it demonstrate that the Q recursion is invalid, only that the answerer refuses to help demonstrate its validity. In contrast, if the answerer does play nicely, we have a Habermasian communicative-action situation, where all parties mutually ascribe rationality to each other and claim "unconditional validity" for what they say. This takes us rather far away from the "recursion as highest" question. But since this thread has sent a few fibers out in the direction of what proper argumentation consists of, I'll close with this:

These argumentative presuppositions [for communicative action] obviously contain such strong idealizations that they invite the suspicion that they represent tendentious description of argumentation. — Habermas,

"Communicative Action and the Detranscendentalized 'Use of Reason'," in Between Naturalism and Religion, p. 50

But Habermas goes on to argue against this suspicion, claiming that the idealizations are both necessary and actually efficacious for keeping argumentation philosophical.

Oh yes, from Mortal Questions. Thanks, I'll think about your take on it.

Gadamer's word here, "hollowness", is really interesting. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and again the context is specifically about that particular kind of gotcha! recursion:

The question arises of the degree to which the dialectical superiority of reflective philosophy corresponds to a factual truth and how far it merely creates a formal appearance — Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 308-9

We have the appearance of being able to corral any discourse back into philosophy -- but where does that leave the search for wisdom?

We spend so much time arguing about how strong particular arguments are -- are we missing something? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. We need to inquire about inquiry, ask ourselves what the value of a strong argument is.

then there's increasing specificity, in terms of subject matter. — Srap Tasmaner

Can you say more about that? Not sure I see it.

What distinguishes the philosopher from the sophist, according to Gadamer, is a matter of intent. A difference in a way of being. (The Idea of the Good, 39.) — Fooloso4

Good find, I'd forgotten he said that (if I ever knew). It fits very well with the above speculations about the ethics of philosophical discourse. We may have uncovered a whole new way of approaching the question of phil. as "highest" -- though a lot more needs to be said about that "difference in being."

we might consider here Nagel's ironic response to absurdity — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is this Thomas Nagel? Or Ernest? What passage do you have in mind?

Argument and discourse are only issues for those beings that have souls ― logic arises in the context of ethics. — Srap Tasmaner

Very good. I often tend to forget that, for Plato and Aristotle and probably for Kant too, there is an ethical motivation for arguing properly, one that has nothing to do with the more familiar "practical reason" or phronesis.

I especially like this passage: "I am in danger at this moment of not having a philosophical attitude about this, but like those who are quite uneducated, I am eager to get the better of you in argument." As Socrates goes on to say, convincing oneself is more important. This probably doesn't happen by a kind of arguing with oneself -- at least not in my case.

I ran across this in Gadamer's Truth and Method, just harking back to the OP if you're interested:

The question arises of the degree to which the dialectical superiority of reflective philosophy corresponds to a factual truth and how far it merely creates a formal appearance. . . . All these victorious arguments have something about them that suggests they are attempting to bowl one over. However cogent they seem, they miss the main point. In making use of them one is proved right, and yet they do not express any superior insight of any value. . . . Thus the formalism of this kind of reflective argument is of specious philosophical legitimacy. In fact it tells us nothing. We are familiar with this kind of thing from the Greek sophists, whose inner hollowness Plato demonstrated. It was also he who saw clearly that there is no argumentatively adequate criterion to distinguish truly between philosophical and sophistic discourse. — Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 308-9

Gadamer goes on to question a subset of reflexive argument, where the interlocutor points out logical or performative contradictions in, e.g., relativism or skepticism. But he is clearly talking about the reflexive nature of argumentation overall, and his doubts about it are similar to mine.

The final sentence I find especially intriguing. Leaving aside the question of whether he's right about Plato, I read Gadamer as saying to us: "No, you're wrong, philosophy is not characterized by a method or a discourse (or, perhaps, a formalism). What differentiates it from sophism is something else -- but there is a difference."

Evolutionary trends are beneficial for humanity, — Seeker25

This is the assumption I'm questioning, at least for purposes of argument. Perhaps you need to say more about what an evolutionary trend is? To avoid begging the question, I think you need to give a description of these trends in value-neutral terms, so we can decide for ourselves whether they must necessarily be beneficial for humanity.

What is rationality other than consistent thinking from some foundational premises or other? — Janus

OK, but specifying the premises, and determining how foundational they are, has been the longstanding task of philosophy, with no obvious right answer in sight. It's like saying, "Move the world? Sure, no problem, just give me a very large lever . . ."

Simply saying that X is a cup if and only if X is a cup or that X is a king if and only if X is a king is vacuous, and doesn't address any philosophical dispute. — Michael

That's not quite what Banno said. He said:

extensionally, X is a cup if and only if X is a cup. Extensionally, we are able to substitute salva veritate — Banno

I've bolded "extensionally" as the key term here. I think your debate is about what constitutes a cup (or a king) intensionally. Once we agree about that, picking out examples is relatively easy, but there's no vacuity involved. And no objects persist or cease to exist, depending.

Let’s grant your thesis that what you’re calling the evolution of the Earth contains important guidance for how humans should behave in order to flourish as a species. Let’s also agree that there are “trends” that can be discovered and used as the basis for that guidance.

Here is what I think you need to argue for:

1. Very few humans give much consideration to the flourishing of the species, and they need reasons – ethical reasons, presumably – why something so abstract should count more than their immediate practical concerns, which may be pursued both successfully and unethically.

2. The trends you’ve isolated are uniformly positive; they can be easily translated into familiar ethical precepts for humans. Isn’t that stacking the deck? Couldn’t we also talk about trends of destruction, suffering, and death? If we knew the end of Earth’s story, and it was one in which the positive trends prevailed, we might be justified in putting the current spotlight on them. But for all we know, the really significant trends are going to turn out to be the destructive ones.

I'm asking the kind of question intended just to prompt thinking, to make you wonder if the answer that comes immediately to mind is right, to make you pause and wonder what other answers might be available. — Srap Tasmaner

Excellent; my favorite kind of question. I guess I should have made it clear that all of that post was to be preceded with a big IF: IF philosophy proceeds rationally, and can give a definition of what rationality is, THEN all of these consequences seem to follow. I'm more unsure than perhaps you imagine about whether the IF is correct. I'm trying to paint a certain picture, which I think is very common to philosophy both now and historically, and then see clearly what the picture shows.

Another way to approach this, maybe a better one, is to call a halt to the "philosophy of philosophy" questions, stop worrying about whether and how phil. and rationality overlap, and simply focus on rationality alone. We'll still have problems about how to define it, but probably all the questions of the OP can be asked of rational discourse per se, without claiming anything one way or the other for philosophy.

If philosophy takes up the question of whether philosophy is rational, and even if it judges that it is, this is merely a result. It may even be descriptive of philosophy's practice in reaching that very conclusion, but it cannot be constitutive of that practice. — Srap Tasmaner

Philosophy is the activity that invents, for its own use, the very idea of rationality — Srap Tasmaner

I may not understand you completely, but isn't the second observation a partial answer to the problem posed by the first?

You're saying that, like mathematics, philosophy produces results which are conceptually distinguishable from phil. itself, understood as the process that led to the results. This seems relatively clear with the math example. But the moment you allow that a result within phil. can be "descriptive of philosophy's practice in reaching that very conclusion," you open the reflexive curtain that leads to the next stage, in which phil. gives itself the (rational) law, a la Kant. I don't know whether phil. invents rationality or discloses it within the world. But either way, we have the result that "philosophy is rational." To put it differently, we could say: Philosophy justifies its rationality at two levels of description -- by producing the "result" that phil. is rational, and also by demonstrating, in the very act of obtaining this result, that this is the only way philosophy can proceed.

One of J's first moves in the OP was to take philosophy and the sciences (and maybe history, I don't know) all together as "rational discourses," or something like that. I don't think that will work. I don't think philosophy can allow itself to be defined by some external perspective — Srap Tasmaner

This observation confuses two different things, doesn't it? On the one hand, we can certainly question whether phil. is constituted by something called "rational discourse," and whether it has that in common with other disciplines such as science. But on the other hand, would this be a case of phil. allowing itself to be defined by an external perspective? Perhaps it's up to phil. to define itself as "rational discourse" (or something else). Here we run up against the self-reflection again: Phil. is trying to look at itself, inquire about inquiry, and make a determination about its nature. The next quote directly follows from that:

(Such a move is even more untenable if you think of "rationality" as one of the areas philosophy is concerned with, and perhaps is authoritative on. Presumably then it would be up to philosophy to decide whether philosophy falls within its own purview, to decide whether this discourse is rational ― but not if it's already defined as "rational".) — Srap Tasmaner

That last clause is tricky. We're postulating a situation in which phil. is authoritative about two things: what rationality is, and whether philosophy is characterized, in a semi-definitional way, as being rational. So let's say that phil., armed with a concept of what rationality is, decides that its own discourse is indeed rational. I think your final clause is meant to suggest there's something dubious or circular going on. But why? There's nothing pernicious about defining something to be rational (though of course one may be wrong), and it's not the case that phil. has "already defined" itself as rational. That defining is precisely what is happening in the present moment of the postulated thought. It didn't happen earlier in the thought process, because it isn't analytic that the discipline that defines what rationality is must also be rational.

Interesting as all this may (or may not) be, your larger question about the marriage of philosophy and rationality, especially when it posits a certain kind of justification as essential to that rationality, seems like the important one.

And the "higher" thing again . . . , yeah, the metaphor just may not work here. Philosophy does something different from other disciplines, and that difference is procedural or formal as opposed to a question of subject matter -- that much I'd defend. My original question was, Is this formal something (aka the Q recursion) worth anything? Does it provide a perspective for thinking that is broader or more perspicuous than the other disciplines? I'm still nagged by the sense that it does, or should, but the discussion on this thread certainly highlights the difficulties of believing such a thing.

This would be a good OP idea. Philosophy as practice, and perhaps praxis. When I try to explain to friends why I do phil., I usually wind up talking in those terms, but not with much clarity.

Great, I'll spend some time on this, but for now, let me just note that The Shitty Terminations would be an excellent name for a band.

all it does is show that an awareness of said relevance isn't necessary to produce a desired result. — KantRemember

Your first post, I see -- welcome to the Forum!

If I understand you, you're saying that (for example) the acoustician could be unaware that Western music theory is indeed relevant to their work. Therefore, we need another criterion of relevance that doesn't involve awareness of said relevance.

That's a good point, and my example was loosely worded. Better to have said, "An acoustician conducts their research in complete independence of what theory may do with it, and it will not be possible to find any relevance for that theory to their work." Is it still clear that relevance isn't symmetric? I suppose this wording is slightly more deniable, because by shifting modal ground and talking about what is and isn't possible, we have to meet a higher bar. But let's not get caught up in extreme and/or unlikely cases. The idea was to question whether relevance is symmetric in a much more powerful and common way -- so that @fdrake's conclusion about what we've calling the Q recursion is true. I think his argument necessitates a near-perfect match of symmetries in order to go through. But perhaps he'll weigh in on this.

Insofar as Y exists, and X is relevant to Y, Y will always be relevant to X due to the connection X has with it. — KantRemember

Well, that's the question, and I think you need to do more than restate it as a conclusion. At issue would be "the connection X has with it" -- how does that show the relation must be symmetrical?

I don't think it follows that one discipline is more primordial/foundational than another based on the "what is your justification for this?" question's recursive nature. I will spell out why.

Asking the question "What's your justification for this?" is recursive. Call asking that question of an assertion X the function Q( X ), which I'll just assume maps to another assertion X'. Every assertion occurs in a context, and call the mapping from an assertion of X to its context C( X ). I'm going to leave 'context' undefined for now, and just assume that every assertion has a context of utterance that makes it understandable, and some rules that characterise that context.

Some contexts will have properties that make their rules philosophical. If a context is characterised by rules of philosophy - again stipulate that such rules are comprehensible and recognisable -, say that that context has the property Phil.

The quote says that for every statement X, there exists a number of recursions of Q^n ( X ), mapping an assertion to its justification, such that Q^n( X ) has a context C characterised by Phil. You can grant that, but you might wonder why such a thing would render philosophy the "top level". Roughly what this claim states is that asking for justification eventually terminates in philosophy, but there's no particular argument for the uniqueness of the termination. The statement in the quote construes Phil as the demarcation between a fixed set of Q and other sets. There's a question about the uniqueness of the fixed set - why does asking that question eventually lead to philosophy? — fdrake

First, just some housekeeping: We considered whether "Why?" was the actual recursive question, and raised some problems about that. But the way you've formulated it here is better, and still allows a robust sense of relevance, unlike the "What would Kant have thought of that?" example. So let's say that Q( X ) asks, "What is your justification for X?"

The idea, then, is that the Top-Level Theory would first have to show that the (undefined but described) C (context) is always philosophical, when the Q recursion takes place. You're willing to grant that, as am I, but the problem comes in the next bit, where we'd have to additionally show that there is a particular kind of uniqueness about this termination in philosophy. I have questions about that, and about uniqueness.

You point out the danger that we've done some definitional fast-footwork here. Philosophy (or the context Phil) is being construed as "the demarcation between a fixed set of Q and other sets." Does this mean that the fixed set of Q is only unique in this way? "Why does asking [the Q question] eventually lead to philosophy?" you want to know, and the suspicion is that is does so because we have defined it thus; there is no other reason.

Let me stop there and ask if I've understood you well enough, and if we're on the same page.

1 ) Take a philosophical claim X which does not have relevance to a claim in any discipline.
2 ) Take the collection of statements of which X has relevance to and call it Q.
3 ) Relevance is transitive, if X is relevant to Y, and Y is relevant to Z, then X is relevant to Z.
4 ) Relevance is symmetric, that is if X is relevant to Y, then Y is relevant to X.
5 ) Relevance is reflexive, X is relevant to X.
6 ) Relevance is an equivalence relation.
7 ) Then anything relevant to X cannot be relevant to any philosophical claim.
8 ) Then all of Q is not relevant to philosophy. — fdrake

I want to return to this loose end. Am I right that we can avoid the conclusion in (8) by denying (4), the symmetry of relevance? Apart from it being a good thing not to have to conclude (8), I think there are independent reasons for denying (4). Consider this example: The natural acoustic properties of tones are relevant to Western music theory, but the reverse isn't true. An acoustician can conduct their research in complete independence of what theory may do with it. The only way I see that we can get "relevance" to be symmetric here is to define it as such, so it means something like "possibility of making eventual connections." But that seems much too broad, and misses the interesting questions about why we care about relevance in the first place.

If there is an air of insubstantiality about this thread, it is because it is concerned with the philosophy of philosophy. — unenlightened

Leaving aside the possible insubstantiality for a moment, what do we make of the fact that there can even be a "philosophy of philosophy"? Isn't this an instance of the recursive, self-reflexive nature of phil. that I began with? Is there a "science of science"? A psychology of psychology? Interestingly, a literature of literature sounds more promising, or at least a literature about literature.

I didn't mean for this thread to get too wound up in definitions of what philosophy is, though I see how that's become an inevitable topic here. But "philosophy of philosophy" is reminiscent of one of the best definitions of phil. that I know: "inquiry about inquiry". This too captures the self-reflection, which the OP posited as perhaps important or characteristic of phil.

Insubstantial? Not to me. The danger is more of ambiguity, I would say -- people talking past each other because they don't share the same concepts and/or language.

the attempt to separate philosophy from other disciplines on the basis of any formal properties or logics is ill-conceived. I think this attempt to fix a sovereign standpoint for philosophy is the flip-side of the equally ill-conceived attempt to locate a sovereign ground for empirical truth in the ‘facts of nature’. In fact, the two tend to imply each other. — Joshs

I'm not as pessimistic as you are about this, but you make an important point: This question is inseparable from the other "foundational" question about the world, and its stability as an object for inquiry. (Habermas v. Gadamer comes in here as well: I read Habermas as optimistic here, Gadamer less so. Not that either would talk about anything being "sovereign.")

I don’t believe there is any domain philosophy tackles that science can’t venture into. I think we agree it’s just a matter of style of expression.
— Joshs

Really? Unless you include both math and metaphysics within science, I don't see how this could be true
— J

What do you mean by metaphysics? You dont consider a scientific paradigm to be a metaphysical stance? And given that logic and mathematics have been developed by both philosophers and scientists, I would say that their status can’t easily be placed with respect to the latter disciplines. — Joshs

Perhaps the disagreement hinges on "venture into." Taken loosely, sure: Science and phil. can venture at will. But no, I don't think that the scientific paradigm is an item within any scientific discipline. It is part of philosophy of science -- a fuzzy boundary, but a boundary nonetheless. As for math, same thing: When a physicist expands a mathematical concept, they're doing math. When they apply the math to QM, they're doing physics. And same comment -- yes, it's fuzzy, but I think we have an idea of the difference between a language and an interpretation.

We don’t first concoct linguistic concepts and then impose them on the world. . . etc. — Joshs

With respect, I don't think there's any common agreement about this. The relationship among language, concepts, and the world is highly contested, and always has been.

To start, could you run "Q recursion" by me again? — T Clark

Yes, sure. Read fdrake's post here: , and his exchanges with me that followed. The Q recursion would be some formalization of a reiterated "Why?" question that, he suggests, may be what I was calling "an argumentative gotcha!" The follow-up on a formalization of "relevance" is also important, I think. I'm still working on a reply to that.

Really, I agree too. That's why I said that I was "being hard on OL folk" by claiming they lack nuance or subtlety. What they often do, though, is claim, or at least imply, that anything outside OL philosophy is therefore a misunderstanding about words, or about meaningful concepts. There doesn't seem room for nuance and subtlety except within the strict parameters of OL phil.

Anyway, the point was to push back on the idea that any philosophy could be somehow purged of being nuanced and subtle. The OL comment was half-kidding.

I think it might be better to ask first why we might think the interaction of philosophy and other discipline might be particularly revelatory. What do we expect an examination of those interactions to show? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, good. I was suggesting only one possibility, the one that shows phil. on the defense, interacting with other disciplines to deny assimilation into one of them. Another familiar picture is "philosophy as critic," stepping in to adjudicate matters of logic and clarity. I'm not crazy about that one, though sometimes it's helpful.

The general point that "discourse" focuses on "why" and "how" questions about what philosophy does, is a good one.

If so, then as Srap pointed out, I've stacked the deck heavily against, e.g., the Freudian who wants to opt out of that sort of discourse.
— J

As I said earlier, he holds that theories of motivation require justification, so he hasn't opted out. — Leontiskos

In the example Srap imagined, he did opt out. Rather than supplying the justification for his theories of motivation, he puts on his Freudian hat and says, "Very interesting . . .Tell me more about the sorts of occasions you feel the need to justify yourself" or some such. The distinction matters, because what the Freudian holds, and would have to defend, is different from what he has to do. I would say that, if he continues in reason-giving, then you're right, he's doing philosophy with us. But what he may hold to be true is different from what he may or may not choose to justify. If he doesn't make that choice, then . . . well, I want to say he's no longer doing philosophy, but certainly others on this thread would disagree.

Notice that this speaks to an earlier concern of Srap's, that my example with the Freudian was hopelessly unrealistic. And indeed, I was imagining the Freudian as absolutely committed to responding to the philosopher with yet more reasons and justifications -- so much so, that he'd abide by the decisions of a Rational Referee. My point was only that, if he does that, he has not succeeded in refuting philosophy on its own terms. But he may not do that at all, and it's an open question whether his style of challenge has its own merits, and if so, what they are.

Gotta run now but I'll catch everyone later . . .

Now that I think about it, I don't think the ideas we bounce around in philosophy need to be all that nuanced and subtle. — T Clark

I'm all for clarity and simplicity, and it annoys me greatly that philosophical genius doesn't always go along with a good writing style, especially in translation. But can you think of anyone other than the OL philosophers whose ideas are not nuanced and subtle? And even that is being hard on the OL folk. Or maybe we have a whole different idea of what a nuance or a subtlety is?

Regardless of whether idealism or realism is true, our phenomenological experience of the world would remain unchanged. — Sirius

This reminds me of the issue raised (most recently by David Chalmers in "Reality+") about virtual worlds. There are some strong arguments to the effect that, if simulated universes are possible, then we are almost certainly living in one. For reasons that are roughly similar to the ones you give about idealism and realism, this shouldn't make any phenomenological difference. Yet this insouciance is extremely difficult to believe. If I did come to accept that the world in which I exist was simulated by a powerful but non-deistic intelligence, perhaps somewhere in the future, I think I'd be rocked to the core. I think I would indeed question every basic assumption I have. And yet . . . on the merits, it shouldn't make a difference to a single thing. This is an example of how philosophy can pose a stark choice: Either I am deeply mistaken about what does make a difference, and must revise my ideas accordingly, or philosophy is wrong in believing it's shown me that the difference between X and Y doesn't matter. This could all apply the realism/idealism question as well.

See my response to @Wayfarer, and the long response above. It would be my hope that we could discover a path to wisdom that is strictly philosophical.

@srap tasmaner, @joshs, @leontiskos, @fdrake, @t clark, @wayfarer, @moliere and apologies to anyone I've mistakenly ovelooked.

It looks to me that there are three positions in question, starting from the OP and moving in very interesting ways through the thread. (And let me remind folks that my OP really was a kind of test-drive of what I called the Top-Level Thesis about philosophical discourse. I'm not personally committed to a particular take on "highest" and I wanted my frequent expressions of dubiety to show this.)

So:

1. Does philosophy have at its disposal a special kind of recursive ability, by which it can fend off challenges about its legitimacy? As far as I can see, only @fdrake has tried to give this some formal rigor, and I'm still working on a response to his thoughts about it. I know that @Leontiskos and perhaps others have their doubts about the use of formalism here, and that leads to . . .

2. If we can isolate the precise nature of what it is that philosophy seems to do -- this sort of jujitsu move against attempts to assimilate it into other disciplines -- what will we have achieved? Let's say we can find a formally precise description of this. Is there anything that tells us this is what rational inquiry is? That this is what the philosophical use of rationality consists of? That other disciplines can't do the same thing?

3. Even more strongly, what gives me or anyone the right to assert that any version of rational inquiry, whether formalized or not, is what philosophy does exclusively? I think we're all comfortable with saying that philosophy often does this, or has historically done this, but do we have a warrant for saying that this kind of discourse is definitional of phil.? My OP allowed that assumption; what I wanted to question was the worth of the Q recursion, not whether phil. is inherently rational, and not whether there might be other understandings of what it means to be rational.

I also want to note a couple of points that @Srap Tasmaner raised. The first concerns the role of justification in phil. It does seem clear to me that we can know, and perhaps even state, any number of truths that we can't justify rationally. (We may be able to justify that they aren't irrational, but that's different.) Am I assuming, in the OP, that the business of phil. is to provide rational justifications? If so, then as Srap pointed out, I've stacked the deck heavily against, e.g., the Freudian who wants to opt out of that sort of discourse. We can all agree that the Freudian is doing something different with his "Very interesting . . . " response, but am I entitled to say that it's no longer philosophy? If I say this, do I need a better reason than "He's opting out of rational justification"? Or do I have an additional argument at my disposal that shows that this is precisely why he's no longer doing phil.? Obviously this has great significance for how we're going to value the Q recursion.

Srap's second point follows from this. He said, with disappointment, that what seemed to him the interesting issues raised by the OP never really got discussed. He saw most of the thread as preliminary thus far. I agree. I think what happened is that we all quickly realized that we didn't have unanimity about the Q recursion, and so one of the key assumptions of the TLT -- that there was this highest rung that phil. could avail itself of -- needed debate and clarification. Just as one "for instance": If any discipline can in principle offer its own recursive refutation of its practices, then the whole premise of the TLT collapses.

For me, the deeper interest here is good old "thinking and being." The OP ended by bringing in Hegel and his dialectical concept of refutations, as an example of how an innocent recursion might point us to some very important truths. This was a gesture. But if we can get ourselves on some kind of firm footing about the nature (or at least one nature) of phil. discourse, we could then ask what this teaches us about how thought and reality may mirror each other. Or not, of course!

I have some thoughts about all of this, but wanted to try laying this out first, just to see if it makes sense as a summary.

A few quick, specific responses:

my primary argument is against setting philosophy up as some sort of pinnacle of human inquiry. I don't see it as all that special. For me, it is an exercise in self-awareness - more a practice than a study. — T Clark

This is the question of the first part of the OP, and your answer may well be true. What we want to know, I think, is whether phil.'s lack of specialness is because a) the Q recursion isn't special to phil. at all, or b) this kind of recursive argumentation is indeed merely a gotcha! generated by a type of formalism we can look at and understand.

In my view, philosophy in its most general sense refers to a mode of discourse melding comprehensiveness, unity, and explicitness. — Joshs

I like the sound of this, but I have to ask for more clarity. A great novel can be shown to meld all three of these qualities, but does that make it philosophy? What about a beautiful prayer? Perhaps you would say that the missing element in both examples is explicitness. What, then, are the discursive tools by which explicitness comes to be? I'm nudging you toward taking the "rational inquiry" idea a bit more seriously. And let's remember that rationality is not univocal. Two of the philosophers I've gotten the most from, Gadamer and Habermas, spent their lives trying to formulate better versions of what it means to be rational, versions that would provide an escape from the crushing scientific rationalism of the 19th century.

I don’t believe there is any domain philosophy tackles that science can’t venture into. I think we agree it’s just a matter of style of expression. — Joshs

Really? Unless you include both math and metaphysics within science, I don't see how this could be true.

The final thing I find interesting about these quoted responses is that they all shy away from the idea that phil. is distinguished by its subject matter. We may disagree about whether phil. is a practice, a discourse, an exercise, a style of expression, but no one seems to believe phil. has a subject all its own. Is that relevant to the question of whether or how phil. could be "highest"? (Or maybe that's why it's a particularly appealing form of bullshit!)

I'm interested in the difference between your descriptions of philosophy and psychology. You describe philosophical thought as united by a "mode of discourse," that features certain attributes, whereas psychology is characterized by "a set of presuppositions." This is quite similar to an idea @Leontiskos was talking about earlier, that the lack of presuppositions may be what makes phil. unique. Are you also trying to make this distinction?

Darn, I was just hitting my stride! I hope whatever you write next will continue the themes of phil. as justification, and also the idea that there was something deeper I was reaching for in my OP, with all the subsequent discussion being preliminary to that. I think that's correct, though preliminary discussion (about what, if anything, it is that philosophical discourse does specially) is necessary before we can ask, as I did, what this might say about being, a la Hegel.

have you considered that you might be misconstruing what you've discovered?

What you describe could also be taken as showing that philosophy is a trap: inquiry is in danger of getting stuck there, no longer producing knowledge. (Which, let's be honest ...) — Srap Tasmaner

Absolutely. That's why I commended @Wayfarer for bringing up aporia. We have to keep this tension in mind -- that what we'd like to believe is phil.'s superpower might in fact be its downfall. But again, until we first get clear about what this superpower is supposed to be, we can't know how to proceed about this.

Cool question! In part they're scare-quotes; I don't want to be seen as naively endorsing the idea of "highest" as "best" or "most perspicuous" that is often associated with philosophy. But also it was an attempt to capture the ambiguity of "highest," which I discuss in the OP. "Highest" can mean what I just wrote -- "best," more or less -- or it can mean "up a level, beyond which there are no more levels," without comment on value. I raised the possibility that phil. discourse is only highest in this sense.

There should be a typographical symbol that would mark ambiguity.

Lots here. I'll have to do this piecemeal due to time constraints, but thanks for giving so much thought to this, despite finding some of the set-up uncongenial.

the initial pitch was for philosophy as the ultimate backstop or bedrock, because philosophy can force any discipline ― or even any claim ― into a philosophical discussion, but once there, any further probing and questioning is just more philosophy. Among the many overlapping ideas in this setup was that philosophical ideas are simply impervious to any but philosophical counters. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, though it leaves out an important emphasis -- that philosophy engages in this kind of discourse in a context of self-defense, so to speak. I wasn't thinking so much about the philosophical gadfly who keeps pulling their interlocutor back into phil. disputes, though of course we all know phil. is capable of this. Rather, the idea was to point up what seemed to me to be phil.'s unique ability to refute explanations or dissolution-by-translation into another discipline or discourse. So the particular "forcing" going on here is the insistence that phil. can only be challenged* with more phil.

*(and I think we're going to see that the nature of what counts as a "challenge" is critical)

Only now it turns out you don't intend to show that this is so, but enforce it, by fiat. You just define the discussion as philosophical from the start. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think this is right. There may indeed be an appeal to definition going on, but not one I'm making up. Or maybe I don't understand you. Would you say that the Freudian "Very interesting..." response is philosophical? I assumed we would all agree that it wasn't, on any common understanding of what we do. Isn't it an attempt to launch a dissolution of philosophy? It avoids what would otherwise be what @Leontiskos noted was a performative contradiction of sorts, since if the Freudian challenges phil. on the level of reason or ideas, he's doing more phil.

So this was indeed the key word in the original post:

And what is your justification for asserting that such an explanation is true?
— J — Srap Tasmaner

This is a good observation. It seems possible that by equating phil. with rational justification, we produce the puzzle we're worrying about.

and this word [justification] is the private property of philosophy. — Srap Tasmaner

I hear your indignation, but I'm not clear on what there is to be indignant about. Are you saying that there are other relevant (in this context) ways of justifying a position that are not philosophical? Or is it that philosophy ought to be so much more than justification?

Have to stop here for now.

When you try to make substantial metaphysical points with a formalism or set theory, you are baptizing the formalism and the set theory into metaphysics. It is natural enough that by limiting your thought to such forms you limit your conclusions to formalisms. — Leontiskos

I prefer to think of it as using a powerful tool to help make discriminations among ideas that are often too vague in English, or at least too vague in an OP by me :smile: . I can't speak for @fdrake, of course, but I don't see any of this as necessarily limiting anyone's thought, unless fdrake or his evil twin were to come along and claim that this is the only way of understanding the issue I raised in the OP. Which I don't think he has. My own interest in the question does indeed go beyond what I think formalism is likely to be able to show, but we need to understand what that is first.